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Obsidian’s 10th Extra Life Anniversary

J.E. Sawyer

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Everything posted by J.E. Sawyer

  1. J.E. Sawyer
    Stronghold tax income is more for balancing maintenance costs (i.e., paying hirelings and repairing damaged upgrades) than a major source of income. Your major source of income will almost certainly be finding money and loot in the world.
  2. J.E. Sawyer
    It's pretty straightforward: sale prices are pegged with the assumption that you will sell everything you find. Sale prices are almost universally much, much lower than buy prices in RPGs and those rates are arbitrated around balancing the economy (at least up to the endgame).
  3. J.E. Sawyer
    Overall, weapon/damage type switching should be occasional, not frequent. We currently have seven damage/resist types. In the vast majority of cases, on any given creature or type of armor, most damage types have the same DT as the base DT. One, two, or possibly three damage types will have a higher or lower DT. Those differences will also be consistent, so if you see someone in mail -- whether it's run-of-the-mill or some awesome magical variant -- their relative DT is always going to be worse for Crush than the base. If you see someone in plate, their relative DT for Shock is always going to be worse than the base. If there are two size variants of a monster, its relative damage type strengths/weaknesses will typically be maintained between the variants.
  4. J.E. Sawyer
    Ballistics can be weird at times. Strangely enough, arrows can have a difficult time penetrating many-layered (like, 20) linen jacks. It's not always simply a matter of incoming force and material strength.
  5. J.E. Sawyer
    Every single ranged attack won't do damage. They can graze or miss just like standard melee attacks. And if you want a shotgun blast, that's what blunderbusses are for.
  6. J.E. Sawyer
    Gaining proficiency or specializing in categories of weapons has existed (at least as an option) in several editions of A/D&D, including Combat & Tactics (2nd Ed.), 4th Ed., Pathfinder, and 3.5 UE's Weapon Groups. Structuring Attributes so there aren't dump stats promotes more role-playing options because non-viable builds should be much less common. Speaking as someone who has played a lot of gimmick builds and characters with sub-par ability arrays for a given class, while it can be very enjoyable to role-play a high-Cha fighter in 3.5/Pathfinder, those characters are typically (barring the use of a lot of special/house rules) pretty ineffective at doing the job their class is supposed to do. Choosing to play certain character concepts becomes an implicit difficulty slider and I don't think it's in the players' interest to link those two things. We have combat style Talents and they should allow you to stick with a fighting style even if an enemy's specific armor strengths/weaknesses promote switching to a different damage type. You also typically have another option: switching a character's targets. We try to structure fights so you have a variety of enemies to contend with.
  7. J.E. Sawyer
    No cover/melee engagement penalties like 3E/3.5/Pathfinder. Even in a turn-based tabletop game those penalties get really odious (cover + in melee = effectively +8 AC) and hard to avoid, so most ranged characters have to take Precise Shot (or get it as part of their class). I'd rather mitigate the per-shot damage done by ranged weapons and not use cover/melee engagement rules. In the end, the result is effectively the same: less damage done over a given period of time. With unmodified accuracy and lower overall damage, it's more normalized/less spiky.
  8. J.E. Sawyer
    Our ranged weapons do good damage, but can't compete blow-for-blow with two-handed melee weapons. The exceptions to this are firearms, but they are relatively inaccurate and slow to reload.
  9. J.E. Sawyer
    Tim and I both have forms of color-blindness (though his is worse than mine). We don't have any difficulty reading the text.
  10. J.E. Sawyer
    We'll probably reveal them as individual notes but keep them together in the log.
  11. J.E. Sawyer
    It is.
  12. J.E. Sawyer
    That quote is from an earlier document, before we started using the term "animancy", which is what is being described. Anyone who uses what could be termed magic is using the power of their own soul, the power of someone else's soul, or the power of disembodied "lost souls" and soul fragments floating through the world.
  13. J.E. Sawyer
    NGUI only uses bitmap fonts, so we'll have to adjust the kerning and other errors by hand, but we're aware of it.
  14. J.E. Sawyer
    It's the opening node of the dialogue so the choices are straightforward. Players will have more personality-laden replies when they make sense in the context and will go somewhere interesting.
  15. J.E. Sawyer
    We already have the slow combat implemented and it works pretty well. I'm sure we'll be adjusting it more as we fine-tune combat pacing and pathing, but it's an enjoyable alternative to full speed vs. full stop.
  16. J.E. Sawyer
    We currently show the spell radius but do not yet highlight characters who will be affected. Many AoE damage spells are friend or foe. Fireball and Crackling Bolt, in particular, can blow up your party easily.
  17. J.E. Sawyer
    We initially had constant Stamina recovery for all characters but it didn't make sense for everyone.
  18. J.E. Sawyer
    Only fighters continuously regenerate Stamina during combat. After combat, Stamina regenerates for everyone very rapidly.
  19. J.E. Sawyer
    This is incorrect. Creatures have their own individual detection radii.
  20. J.E. Sawyer
    I can't guarantee that you'll be able to "ghost" areas in PE, but if you build a party with the Stealth skill as a focus, you may be able to circumvent a lot of encounters if you so choose. If you dabble in Stealth, you will probably wind up using it more for combat positioning. While rogues do have a bonus to Stealth, so do several other classes, and no class has an inherent penalty to sneaking. It will be quite possible for you to keep your entire party close in overall Stealth values if you choose to focus on that skill.
  21. J.E. Sawyer
    If classes excel and suffer at different elements of gameplay but are still roughly as viable as each other throughout the game, the challenge isn't the same at all. "Balanced" does not mean "the same". Playing different classes should make challenges out of obstacles that were previously easy and turn cakewalks into struggles in equal measure. If you just want the game to be harder overall, that's what the level of difficulty is for.
  22. J.E. Sawyer
    And chance get bigger if you go against opponets above of your level. Level is a big factor in your total defenses, but the character's class determines the starting point of each defense stat (which can be further modified by attributes, spells, abilities, talents, and equipment). For example, fighters start with the highest Deflection score and they maintain that advantage as they level up. If a fighter really wants to focus on holding a line in melee over doing damage, he or she can equip a shield and gain an even larger Deflection bonus. Unless you're higher level than the fighter, it's very unlikely that your Deflection-based attacks will come close to his or her Deflection defense, meaning you'll wind up missing a lot more than 5% of the time -- and it will probably be impossible to crit them. If you want to hurt fighters, use attacks that target Reflexes or Psyche, which are their weakest base defenses. Most classes have at least one ability or spell that shifts the defense they are targeting with standard attacks. E.g. barbarians have a Brute Force ability that allows them to temporarily switch over to targeting Fortitude. Against our sample fighter, that would have the two advantages of ignoring the target's high base Deflection and ignoring the bonus provided by the shield. As another example, druids have a spell called Firebrand that creates a weapon made out of pure fire. In addition to doing only fire damage, it targets the Reflexes defense. So, while it's true that an equal defense and accuracy will result in a 5% chance to miss, it's rare that defense and accuracy will actually be equal on any given attack.
  23. J.E. Sawyer
    Portions of the character become translucently rim-lit with their selection circle color when they move behind occluding geometry.
  24. J.E. Sawyer
    Oh, one other thing: everyone in that screenshot is a human or elf. We have orlans, aumaua, dwarves and (soon) godlike models as well. Since this was mostly about showing the environment and some of the new armor types, we didn't switch out the races.
  25. J.E. Sawyer
    All of the cloth parts on the party members (and the enemies, actually) have tint maps applied so you can go buck wild with colors if you'd like. E.g. the character at the center of the party in red brigandine. We initially set him up with mustard yellow brigandine and purple pants. He certainly stood out, but looked pretty garish. Ultimately, those color choices are all up to you. Companions will come with defaults that we think look good, but if you want to alter their primary/secondary colors, you can. We're trying to always leave cloth areas on the arms and legs (at least) to use the primary/secondary color channels.
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